Fashion Disaster

Fashion Disaster
(Book-exclusive)
Published	August 3, 2017 (2017-08-03)
Page count	3
Major characters	Abbey, Stacy
Minor characters	Katie, Tess
Locations	Roseville High School
Collected in	Volume Five
Appears between
← Local Area Small Fry →

Fashion Disaster is a book-exclusive chapter appearing in Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Volume Five. Abbey needs Stacy’s expertise, but he opens with the one thing she never, ever wants spoken out loud in a school hallway. What follows is some very quick thinking on his part.

Synopsis

Stacy is chatting with a fellow cheerleader in the hallway when Abbey comes waving her down. He’s been looking for her, he explains, because he’s been meaning to ask her something, and he gets as far as “the SwordsVale cosplay” before trailing off. The comic cuts to a black-and-white shot of Stacy frozen in wide-eyed horror, a fan clutched to her face, while her friend looks on baffled.

Under Stacy’s furious glare, a sweating Abbey thinks fast. Her game is a strict secret, a rule she laid down in no uncertain terms just one chapter earlier, and he isn’t about to expose it now. So he hurriedly claims he meant the corset from a fashion event he saw in Super Glamour Monthly, then asks whether he should get Daisy viridian or pine green. Stacy catches on, drops her furious glare, and gives a delighted gasp. Now that Abbey has made it sound like ordinary fashion talk, Stacy answers him in public and swings straight into expert mode. She recommends the pine to match the crimson brooch Daisy wears, and promises Daisy would look super cute in it.

Abbey thanks her and heads off down the hall, turning back at a distance to pump his fist with a determined “For Daisy!” Stacy waves goodbye and sighs contentedly. Beside her, a thoroughly unimpressed Katie gets the last word: “Ewwwwuh, Viridian?!”

Character dynamics

Stacy takes Abbey’s slip of the tongue with quiet dignity.

• Abbey and Stacy: The two play together on Stacy’s private SwordsVale server, where Abbey was revealed as a fellow player just one chapter earlier. Stacy has already told the group that nobody else can know about the game, so Abbey is expected to guard her secret as carefully as she does. One horrified glare is all it takes to remind him. Once he rephrases his question as harmless fashion talk, Stacy turns into an eager co-conspirator, perfectly happy to talk shop with him in the open so long as nobody listening can tell what the conversation is really about.

Trivia & observations

• In timeline order, this is the first chapter to call Stacy’s game by name. Local Area introduces the server without ever naming it. In publication order, “SwordsVale” first appeared in Guest of Honor.
• Super Glamour Monthly, the fashion magazine Abbey names in his cover story, gets its only mention in the series here.
• Stacy signs off her advice with a “fer sure”, the same phrase that closes out Local Area one chapter earlier.

Related chapters

• Local Area: The chapter immediately before this one, in which Stacy’s private roleplaying server comes to light and Abbey is revealed to be one of its players. Her parting demand there, “NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW,” is exactly the rule Abbey nearly breaks in this hallway.
• Guest of Honor: The SwordsVale cosplay Abbey starts to ask about turns up on-panel there, when he, Stacy, Sue and Amaya all arrive at a convention in costume.
• Popularity Contest: Stacy spends that whole chapter keeping her SwordsVale hobby away from her popular image, insisting she still loves the game and just “got a life outside of it”. Katie also revives her disgusted “Ewwwwuh!” there, this time at the word “raid”.